In the minds of many people, cancer is a disease that cannot be cured at all. Especially after the diagnosis of cancer, in the oncology ward, they may see patients who have died of cancer and patients who have been hospitalized again due to cancer recurrence every day.
Therefore, cancer patients are full of despair, thinking that cancer is a disease that cannot be cured at all, and even if there are no cancer cells in the body after the current treatment, it will recur again!
Indeed, the most frightening thing about cancer is that it has a chance of recurrence. However, not all cancer patients will relapse after treatment, and the decision on the patient's chance of recurrence is often related to the following points:
1. Pathological type
Cancer is simply a generic term for all malignancies, referring to cellular DNA variants that appear on the epithelial tissue of one of a patient's organs. However, the cancer itself is divided into multiple pathological types, and even if it appears on the same organ, the pathological types may be different.
Usually, the more well-differentiated the cancer, the lower the degree of malignancy, so the probability of recurrence is relatively low.
On the contrary, if it is a low-differentiated, undifferentiated malignant tumor, due to its extremely high degree of malignancy, there may be infiltration and metastasis in the early stage, so recurrence is also more common and the prognosis effect is extremely poor. Even if surgical resection is performed early, there is a possibility of recurrence in the later stages;
2. Pathological staging
In addition to the pathological type, malignant tumors also have different stages in the clinic, which is commonly known as the early, middle and late stages. In the clinical view, the earlier the cancer is detected and actively treated, the better the prognosis will be, and the survival rate of patients within five years is higher and the recurrence rate is relatively low.
However, on the contrary, after entering the middle and advanced stages of cancer, patients may lose the opportunity to operate, and conservative treatment is less effective. Even if the tumor can be removed by surgery, the recurrence rate after surgery has reached more than 70 to 90%;
3. Therapeutic and nursing effects
No cure for cancer is once and for all. In the case of surgery, it simply removes the cancer, part of the normal tissue and removes the lymph nodes, but it cannot remove the small cancer cells scattered around and potentially metastatic cancer cells.
If the patient's follow-up treatment is not followed up, the body is too weak, can not withstand the side effects caused by radiotherapy and chemotherapy, or the immunity continues to decline, and the post-care is not in place, it may lead to the recurrence of cancer;
4. Genetic and age effects
It is true that cancer can be clinically cured through a combination of surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, targeted or immune drugs, but it cannot change the genes in the patient's body. If the inherited gene plays an important role in the process of the patient's cancer, and the gene has not changed, the patient has the possibility of cancer again at a later stage.
Because the mechanism of cell differentiation regulation in the patient's body has not changed, the living environment of cancer cells has not changed, and aging has become a fact, in this case, in theory, the patient's cancer will recur again, it is only a matter of time.
In clinical view, the recurrence of cancer means that the patient's previous treatment process is all scrapped and needs to start fighting cancer from scratch. Cancer can develop rapidly, prompting patients to gradually move towards death.
Therefore, having cancer is not the most terrible, the terrible thing is that the cancer will come back again. To avoid cancer recurrence, what patients need to do is to cooperate with doctors for thorough treatment, follow-up of post-care, and regular follow-up.